Jive Makes Moves Into Mobile And Social

Jive moves into the cloud and empowers social, mobile workers with new announcements, including a partnership with Box. What does the BYOD and consumerization of IT mean for the future of collaboration?

At JiveWorld 2012 in Las Vegas, Jive Software made moves in the social collaboration space, announcing a partnership with Box, a new training sales team productivity application, and a public and private cloud software called Jive 6.

For example, the Box partnership will allow users to access Jive through the Box Embed feature (which we described earlier here). Employees can also access files stored in Box via Jive and sync documents across both platforms. The service will be available in the first quarter of 2013, and will allow mobile workers to collaborate more securely.

Jive CEO Tony Zingale told BYTE that Jive's focus on the web, social, and mobile -- and the fact that they consider collaboration from inside and outside the organization, is what makes their products unique -- compared to Microsoft, Salesforce, and smaller players like Lithium.

Jive is a 12 year old company and went public last year. The company started as an external discussion forum has grown to 500 employees. Its social applications can be accessed through a browser and hosted in a public or private cloud. Jive also offers HTML 5 apps and a native version for iOS. Zingale said Jive creates external customer communities and also develops an employee-facing collaboration system.

According to Jive, 16% of employees in the enterprise are using tablets, but they expect that will increase to nearly 50% in the next five years. Not surprisingly, 65% of the tablets used will be iPads. 96 million tablets will be used in the enterprise, mainly to help sales people sell more and be more productive.

"What we are seeing is enterprises retooling, looking for new paradigms through social, mobility, cloud, and big data. Knowledge workers use social and mobile, which presents a big data challenge. BYOD is growing and accelerating social collaboration capabilities," Zingale said, "but collaborating must be done in a secure way and the companies need to know how to handle big data. People are using services like Dropbox and IT organizations struggle with that," he said.

"We see a lot of organizations trying to shut down applications that are not controlled by the company. It is disruptive in an enterprise perspective," Zingale said.

For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers deployed Jive's software to 100,000 of its employees. The IT organization was involved and used third party applications that can secure and back up the data.

As far as the future of working goes, Zingale said: "I think it becomes the normal way that work gets done. Enterprise retools and becomes more consumerized to reflect how we live our lives [at home]. We are always plugged in. I think what we will see is that the workforce will morph."

"We will no longer will see a 25-person email with a Powerpoint attached. We are going to see a shift in how work gets done and it will mirror how our personal lives got shifted. Work will feel like it does when we are booking an airline reservation or when we are looking up a restaurant review in Yelp," he added.